Can vaccines cure ME/CFS or Long Covid?

For sure, although the author of the blog does acknowledge that.

I can understand someone who experienced an improvement around the time of being vaccinated would want to write about it, and who knows, perhaps it is a clue. I'm happy for people to write about most things they think have helped so long as they acknowledge the uncertainty.

I note that this woman's vaccination schedule was pretty full on. It's possible to make a few other hypotheses from this experience, including that the earlier broad immunological challenge was what did the trick, rather than the followup JEV dose. I can imagine some change processes taking a couple of weeks rather than a couple of hours.

Similar to Peter and his hesitancy to rush out for a JEV vaccine, I won't be rushing out to have a smorgasbord of vaccines either.

 

She became ill in Dec 2021 - [edit, as I had assumed her recovery was recent] - she had the vaccinations and followup in April 2022 - so no more than 6 months...

 

This is a problem with n=1. The illness fluctuates a lot, and there's an enormous desire to think that you are improving.

I think I've written elsewhere, about a year into my illness I got my GP to fill out a health declaration for me, to say that I was now well enough to return to a consulting assignment. I thought that an antimicrobial drug (paromomycin) had cured me of an amoebic infection that was causing the symptoms. It was hopeful thinking on the part of both of us, because I ended up dreadfully sick with a severe urinary tract infection, on my own in a hotel room on the opposite side of the world. I managed to get home, where it took me months to recover. I never did complete that assignment.

I remember telling people at my daughter's school that the same drug was responsible for her feeling better too. (My daughter actually went on to recover, but I think she was always on that trajectory, and I doubt the drug really helped.)

So, I don't blame Rachel Strohm one bit. I expect many of us have been convinced that we have recovered at some point, and some of us might have shared what we believe has fixed us on social media, wanting to help others. The great news of a recovery tends to get shared a lot more than the slow realisations that it wasn't real.

If I was giving advice to people newly diagnosed with ME/CFS or Long Covid, among it, for their sake and ours, would be, 'in the first two years, don't make any public claims about things curing you'.